


one for sorrow

by tardigradeschool



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 10:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13293366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tardigradeschool/pseuds/tardigradeschool
Summary: Whether Lup and Barry saved the world or not, they did violate rules. Being reapers is their job, but it’s also a kind of community service, since it’s the reason they aren’t in prison. So there’s a certain amount of time that they’ve agreed to work for the Raven Queen, and that contract has to be fulfilled one way or another.Or, Lup and Barry: separated again, but not forever.





	one for sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> this was a prompt that got away from me. the title is from the nursery rhyme "one for sorrow".

Being a reaper becomes considerably less fun once all your friends are dead. 

There’s a time where, even after Taako dies, it’s not so bad. It sucks balls not seeing him as much, but they can still visit their family in the afterlife sometimes. They keep up with Merle’s (and later, Angus’s) kids and grandkids and great-grandkids – generations of people who grow up calling them “uncle” and aunt”, who eventually have their own children for Lup to swing around the garden and Barry to read stories to. Eventually, Kravitz retires so he can be with Taako. They throw him a party. Their social circle gets a little smaller. Lup starts marking the calendar with countdowns to when they can visit the Astral plane.

After a while, they stop having as much contact with Merle and Angus’s families. Mortal lives pass by so fast, and it’s considerably harder to reap someone that you held as a baby what seems like last year. Their jobs – which once seemed exciting – now seem like a chore at best and cruel at worst. Barry can see the way it weighs on Lup; she needs people, and right now she only has one. They still have centuries left each. Barry isn’t sure when he makes his decision, but when he goes to the Raven Queen, she looks like she’s been expecting him. 

He doesn’t know exactly how he expects Lup to react. When he tells her, she looks at him for a long time, her eyebrows drawn together. “I don’t want to leave you,” she says.

“C’mon,” Barry says quietly. “Lup, I know you. You wouldn’t even consider it unless you were fucking miserable, and I can tell you’re thinking about it. Besides, time is different over there. It wouldn’t seem like so long.” 

“But it would for you,” she point out. Double their sentences is objectively a long time, long enough that Barry doesn’t really want to think about it.

“Just think about it,” he says. The conversation changes after that, but that night Lup curls up around his back and holds him like someone is trying to take him away. They don’t really talk about it again.

A couple months later, Taako makes up some excuse to throw a party, because he refuses to say that he misses seeing people. By the time they arrive, Taako has already hiked his ballgown over his knees to try sliding down his grand staircase on a drinks tray. Magnus is proudly challenging every person in sight to arm wrestle with his wife. Carey has lost to Julia three times already but she's trying again. Merle has acquired a feather boa from somewhere and keeps looping it around peoples knees so they'll dance with him. Barry and Lup can’t eat the food in the Astral plane, but Lup hauls around a wine bottle anyway, so she can gesture with it. Barry hasn’t seen her this happy in years.

At the end of the night, he finds Lup looking out over the balcony, hair spilling out of an intricate bun and shoes discarded hours ago. When she turns to him, she looks almost guilty. Barry doesn’t want her to have to say it.

“You should stay,” he says. 

Her shoulders slump, but she doesn’t disagree. “Barry,” she says, like she said his name when she pulled him offstage at the conservatory. Like she said his name when one of them came back to life. She leans into him, resting her forehead on his shoulder. Without her heels, she’s the same height as he is.

“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it,” he says. "You know that.

“I know,” she says, turning her face up to kiss him. “Barry–”

“Don’t thank me,” Barry says. “Please.” He kisses her back, then gently knocks his forehead against hers. “I’ll visit all the time. And I’ll write you letters. That’s romantic, right?”

“Romantic as fuck,” Lup agrees. 

He leaves that night, because he thinks it would be worse not to.  Pulling himself out of bed knowing that he wouldn't be able to come back would be so much harder than never getting in bed in the first place.

Barry works out a schedule with the Raven Queen that lets him visit fairly frequently – even if he can’t stay very long each time. Barry often reminds himself that this is more than most people ever get. Seeing Lup every so often infinitely better than thinking she’s gone, and seeing Lup happy is worth everything he has to give. 

He lets himself drift away from Faerun. He doesn’t really visit except for work. Theologians have debates about whether Kravitz and Barry are separate entities or a continuation of the same myths. Once, Barry encounters a bust of himself, which is incredibly weird, despite the fact that the definite cheekbones the statue has make it somewhat unrecognizable.

At some point, he wakes up and realizes that he doesn’t know any people who are alive. 

The world has changed, Barry realizes slowly. Technologies that Barry didn’t notice developing are suddenly everywhere. The Day of Story and Song, which took place the better part of a thousand years ago, is still celebrated, but with figures that Barry barely recognizes. Every so often, he sits in on history classes just so he can have a story to bring back to Lup. At one point, several so-called historians insist that the Relic Wars did not happen at all. He doesn’t tell Lup about that.

Barry stops keeping track of how long he has left. Barry doesn’t really want to think about it. Time, for him, is measured in increments of seeing Lup, and for a long time it would be a painful exercise to try and measure out the time he has left in those.

When he sees her, Lup seems happy. She’s a people person at the end of the day, and she has her almost all her people with her. She’s been doing research on the forces that hold planes together, and it’s so brilliant that Barry seriously considers sneaking it out of the Astral plane so that someone other than him can appreciate it. The only reason he doesn't is because some of the proofs rely on math that this plane hasn't seen yet. Sometimes he catches her with a smile that’s a little stiff, and he knows that even though she sees him more often than he sees her, this is the better solution rather than the best one.

There are bad nights. Barry doesn't technically need to sleep, but the force of habit is so strong that he sometimes feels like he does. Lup records messages for him whenever he visits, so sometimes he listens to those. After the first couple decades, he has a veritable archive. 

It's not the same as having her there, but hey. He makes do.

 

Barry wakes up in Lup’s bed – which, although he can’t sleep there as often as he wants to, is not especially unusual – but he wakes up because of the light on his face. He’s never needed an alarm; his anchor to the other planes literally calls to him once he’s stayed here too long. He should have had to leave hours ago. Barry fumbles for his glasses. 

“Lup?” he says. “What’s going on– I have to go–” 

“No,” Lup says. “You don’t.” She pushes herself out of bed to her wardrobe and pulls out a thick roll of paper as long as her arm, then tosses it across the room. It unfurls, revealing hundreds of thousands of checked off boxes. Lup grabs a fantasy Sharpie and crosses out the last box with painstaking care. She grins cautiously over at him. “Welcome to hell, babe,” she says. “Oh, don’t cry!”

Barry scrubs a hand over his face. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, sorry.” Everything feels realer somehow, the sheets under his hands and the sunlight on his face. Lup, in front of him. His ribcage feels like a balloon about to pop. He manages a wet laugh. “What did you expect me to do?”

“Kiss me, maybe,” Lup says, dropping onto the bed in front of him. “And other stuff. Y’know. Got a whole day planned, actually.” Lup is badly concealing her own grin. She leans forward and catches his face in her hands, stroking her thumbs over his stubbly cheeks. 

One kiss, in the grand scheme of things, is not a lot. But Barry thinks it’s a pretty good start.

**Author's Note:**

> im mcgonagollygee on tumblr


End file.
